Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

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Fish Tank Commander

Keep in mind that you will be seeing each-other's games! Please try to avoid confusing yourselves. :)

Feel free to challenge me (quill18) -- I'll try to be as responsive as possible!

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Fish Tank Commander is a multiplayer, turn-based tactics game set in the world's most violent aquarium. Your goldfish and seahorses will battle your opponent's bettas and turtles for dominance of the tank!

Every win and lose is tracked and you will be ranked using Elo Ratings -- the same as professional chess players. You also earn XP for every game, which unlocks huge e-Peen!

A full map editor is built right in, and users can vote for their favorites. Make your own maps, then own people with it!

Fish Tank Commander was programmed in Ruby on Rails and JavaScript using Sublime Text 2 and Gimp and is hosted on Heroku. Full source code is available on GitHub!

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The entire game creation was streamed live and recorded at: http://www.twitch.tv/quill18

It's a little difficult to get an opponent because you can only challenge one guy and not just wait for the first one that appears (or maybe I missed this in the interface?)
Otherwise, nice idea and very impressive for only 48 hours.

This game rapidly progressed from something I wanted to just make for the compo into something that's going to turn into a real product, shippable product in the vein of "Chess with Friends" and such (in my dev copy I'm already adding Facebook integration and ensuring iOS/Android compatibility).

Unfortunately, by moving in that direction I've ended up with something that isn't well suited to a quick playthrough for voting purposes. In hindsight I focused too much on the user-account rankings and map editing and should have made - for this competition - an anonymous queuing with just the core gameplay.

On the other hand, then I probably wouldn't have a product I felt was on the verge of being shippable.

Blah. Decisions are hard.

TL;DR: I'm certain my score will for this compo will suck, but I'm okay with it.

It doesn't matter if there is a login thing and people think it is not in the spirit of LD. It totally is. You got ideas during the weekend, you probably learnt a lot and this will make you go on in the future, so in my opinion this is, for you, totally in the spirit of LD.

I definitely have to give you points for ambition. Throwing together a MOTBS over 48 hours cannot be easy. However, playing the game becomes a bit of a grind for a few reasons: no realtime updating, you have to rely on messages. No lobby, so you have to track down someone willing to have a match. No animations at all, leaving me wondering whether or not my damage took. Not enough movement or strategy when it comes to the fights, half of the game is just trying to move into a battle-ish shape. The infrastructure is un-nesecarrily complicated for such a small game. It does work well though.

Overall: Great aspirations, but too many flaws for me to see to the gameplay behind. 3/5

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone! I've just hit 100 issues on Github and have already closed 33 tickets (primarily on my dev site). I have 2 months of work already mapped out to turn this into a truly enjoyable, competitive game. This includes much better matchmaking and social tools (such as chatting), not to mention many gameplay changes including rules changes and new units.

I can't wait for the voting to be over so I can push out some new changes! (As is, I'm trying to restrict my changes to site-breaking performance issues, plus the text on the front page.)

I have to give you points (lots) for the technical aspect since the matching system is working fine. I'd still suggest focusing on gameplay and making it easier to play first (long term project or not). It does need to have an account system, for example, especially if that's not the selling point of the game.

Unfortunately, like many others, I wasn't able to play a game since I couldn't see who is available (and could only challenge one person).

Still I'd like to see more entries like this.

I also get the "We're sorry, but something went wrong." error each time I try to return to the games list.